There was a time when dairy was considered “rasa” or the
subtle energy of richness, sweetness, and delight. In India, for example
the general population would regularly have a little amount of dairy. This
small amount was a way of supplying B12. The cows were treated with a
great deal of love and respect. The milk was given freely and they were
milked by human hands. Even so, Swami Muktananda, a world-acknowledged
master in Kundalini and Shaktipat transmission, taught that all dairy
clogs the nadis (subtle energy channels).

In this context, it is important to understand that “you
cannot eat your way to god.” A healthy vegan live food diet is best for
turning your body into a superconductor for the divine; however this does
not necessarily mean that if you eat dairy products you will not become
liberated.

The focus of this article is to clear some of the
confusion about the purity, harmlessness, and safety of consuming dairy
products. This includes organic and raw un-pasteurized dairy. Dairy
products include milk, cheese, cream, butter, yogurt, and whey from
lactating animals. Stopping dairy intake is not just about just about our
personal health, but is also associated with the prevention of cruelty to
cows and the protection of the ecology & energy of the planet. In this
context, going vegan is a call to put our own self-serving or narcissistic
needs aside and move toward elevating planetary healing. We can do this by
choosing a diet that serves both the healing of the planet and ourselves.

The “rasa” time is gone, which you can see if you take a
new look at the way the dairy industry has changed this historically
acceptable practice. It is interesting today that many yogis from India
refuse to drink milk in the U.S. One of my mentors, the famous
nutritionist, Paavo Airola PhD would never eat or drink dairy in the U.S.
because of the intolerable cruelty to dairy cows as well as the other
problems associated with commercial or even raw dairy!

For spiritual and environmental reasons, dairy has
become “ama.” For eye-opening and heart-stopping details and visual
treatment of cows, watch the film “Earthlings.” You will quickly
understand how cruelly cows are treated before being killed for meat and
“Indian leather.” The relationship India once had with the “Sacred Cow”
has sadly changed the animal’s milk from “rasa” to “ama” or pure toxins.

Today, although you can get “organic raw milk,” it is
very difficult to get non-commercial, real grass-fed, free-range organic
milk. Even with the best grass fed milk there are no guarantees of purity
and, of course, the cows are still milked artificially. Whether raw or
pasteurized, there are opioids (casomorphins) in it that make it easier
for humans to be addicted to milk. According to Dr. Neal Barnard, M.D. in
his book Breaking the Food Seduction, the strongest morphinogenic compound
in dairy is as powerful as 1/10th the power of pure morphine.

Cruelty and Suffering

Ongoing cruelty in the dairy industry is widespread! If
you are a lacto-vegetarian because you think that these animals are not
killed for food and do not experience suffering to produce dairy. Think
again! Not only does the dairy cow end up on the plates of your
carnivorous friends, she also experiences tremendous amount of cruelty in
the whole “production” cycle, making death a final horrific release from
suffering. And the male cows are used for clothes, fertilizer, animal
feed, and pet food, among other things. This is, of course, after their
sperm has been used to produce more females.

To keep the dairy animal’s milk flowing, she is
artificially inseminated two to three months after giving birth. The
result is a crushing double burden of pregnancy and lactation for seven
months out of every 12. In truth, the dairy cow is the hardest worked of
all farmed animals, nurturing a growing calf inside her while
simultaneously producing 30-50 liters of milk a day. No other farmed
animal carries this dual load of pregnancy and lactation. Professor John
Webster has likened the workload of the high-yielding dairy cow to that
of: “…a jogger who goes running for six to eight hours every day.” He
believes that “the only humans who work harder than the dairy cow are
cyclists in the Tour de France.”

Today dairy cows are usually chained up in very confined
limited spaces and are milked by machines. Reproduction happens through
the process of artificial insemination. The cycle of cruelty begins at the
time of the birth of the baby calf, for which the mother’s body is ready
to nurse. These bonded animals both suffer greatly when the female baby
calves are taken away after only three days. The mothers are then left to
be suckled by automated machines. The male calves are taken away in the
first few hours and enter the cruel death cycle of the veal industry.
Before being slaughtered, the male calves are kept caged and immobilized
without sunlight or nutrition for 6-weeks. It is commonly known that the
mother cow knows that her calf is going to be taken away from her and
harmed or killed, and the distress, which can last for days, causes toxins
to be secreted into her milk.

In previous historical times, the practice in India
recognized that the milk belonged first to the calf. The mother cow fed
her calf first and only after the calf had taken its fill was the leftover
milk taken for human consumption. In this way, the abundance of milk was
shared with the family who owned her.

Overproduction and Genetic Alteration

Cows today are genetically designed to produce up to 25
times more milk. Fifty years ago, the average cow created 2,000 lbs of
milk per year. Now the top dairy producers give 50,000 lbs per year.

Factory Production Techniques

To produce such astounding production quotas the cow has
become part of an elaborate industrial process. Milking machines have been
used since the 1870’s. Today the cow is attached to these machines for
hours on end. This overproduction is achieved by the use of Bovine Growth
Hormone (BGH), other hormones, antibiotics, drugs, and force-feeding. The
BGH creates a 50-70% increase in mastitis. The mastitis is treated with
even more antibiotics. The cows are also fed with sheep and fish parts,
made into a meal. It is unbelievable what goes on in the life of the cow!

Shortened Lifespan

Before the industrial age we could say that cows lived a
more natural lifestyle. Today their artificial lifestyle creates an array
of diseases in both the animals and those that eat or use their products
as we shall see later in this article. Now due to unnatural
overproduction, what is actually happening to the cows being used for milk
production? The normal average lifespan of a cow is about 18-35 years.
This increased milking combined with being pregnant and lactating, milks
away her life force. The average milk producing cow lives an average of 3
years, a factor of a 6-10 times shorter life. In human terms, we can say
that, rather than living to a ripe old age of 80, one’s life would end
before reaching puberty. Cruelty and exploitation take a toll!

Wasted Resources & Ecological Damage

In this dairy system we also create a massive hoarding
of resources. There is a tremendous loss in energy, materials, labor and
caloric value. Better use of these resources could help solve the food
crisis on the planet and prevent the death by starvation of 29,500
children per day (according to UN statistics) and approximately 40 million
people who starve to death each year. There is a tremendous amount of
energy and grain that is required to feed the cows. The food required to
feed 100 cows could potentially feed 2,000 people. The cows in the world
consume two times the calories as the world human population. In US the
cows consume five times the amount of grain as humans.

Cattle farming, which includes our dairy cows, causes
the loss of 85% of the topsoil each year. Not only this, the water used in
the dairy industry (and its by-products) is EXTREMELY high. A vegan
lifestyle can potentially save 1,500,000 gallons of water and 1 acre of
trees each year! If we all became vegan there would be enough energy and
food to feed the world human population seven times over.

Chernobyl Reaches Boston

Chernobyl made it very clear that we are one
interconnected global village. Cows are higher up on the food chain, and
concentrate the toxins. For example there was a 900% increase in perinatal
mortality in the six weeks to three months after Chernobyl in the Boston
area. What they found was that the cows were consuming the radioactive
iodine that came from Chernobyl that landed in the water and on the grass.
The mothers consuming the cow milk filled with radioactive iodine. This
radioactive iodine was poisoning their babies. Now we are facing the chem-trail
and depleted uranium atmosphere contamination which the cows are also
concentrating, especially range fed cows.

Disease Production

CJD - Creutzfeldt-Jacobs disease

The result of all this cruelty and industrialization of
live stock, especially of cows is that cows have become carriers of a
significant disease. The 2004 edition of Friends of the Earth cites
several autopsy studies in the United States that suggest between 3% and
13% of the people diagnosed with Alzheimer’s actually had “mad cow
disease” or Creutzfeldt-Jacobs disease. The research in Friends of the
Earth suggests that Creutzfeldt-Jacobs can be transmitted by a person
consuming less than one gram of the diseased tissue from any part of the
cow. It alsosuggests that there may be at least 120,000 cases of
Creutzfeldt-Jacobs disease that are unreported in the United States.

Pus Cells and Mucus

According to http://www.notmilk.com the average liter of
milk in Florida has 633 million pus cells, which is the highest in the
nation. Montana is the lowest, with 236 million pus cells per liter. This
is not a healthy thing, whether it is 236 or 633 million. Besides pus
cells and blood, which are now normal in milk produced during machine
suckling, the milk is also high in pesticides, herbicides, antibiotics,
hormones, radioactive iodine, and disease factors such as mad cow prion
and bovine leukemia virus. In addition research cited by Robert Cohen of
http://www.notmilk.com has made the point that there is up to a gallon of
extra mucus in the body that is created as a result of drinking dairy. The
mucus problem is associated with the fact that eighty percent of milk
protein is casein, the main ingredient of Elmer’s glue.

Deadly Diseases

In addition, milk is a carrier for very significant
disease vectors.

Mycobacteria Para-TB: One of these disease vectors is
the mycobacteria Para-TB, which causes not so much TB (although TB may be
in raw milk), but causes a chronic diarrhea and colitis. We know that in
babies, this is often seen as irritation that causes a significant blood
loss and anemia. In the cow, it is called myco-bacterial para-tubercula.
It causes what we call “Johnne’s” disease, which is chronic diarrhea and
colitis. It seems to be something that is transmitted to humans as well,
particularly unpastuerized milk.

Studies performed in the United States, the UK, and the
Czech Republic have found that live, viable M. paratuberculosis organisms
are even present in retail pasteurized milk sold in stores. These studies
prove that either (a) the organism is capable of surviving conventional
pasteurization (the more likely explanation) or (b) there is a significant
source of post-pasteurization contamination in the milk supply.

While it has not been definitively proven that M.
paratuberculosis causes disease in humans, there are a number of
researchers who believe that the organism is a primary cause of Crohn's
disease. They cite clinical similarities between Johne's disease in
ruminants and Crohn's disease in humans, as well as studies showing that a
significant number of Crohn's patients also have the organism in their
gut. However, there is no consensus yet of the effects of a M.
paratuberculosis infection. What is clear is that all known mycobacteria
can cause disease, that M. paratuberculosis causes disease in ruminants,
and that the bacteria are present in retail milk.

Salmonella, e. coli, yersinia enterocolitica, and
Staphococcusare some of the main disease vectors. In 1984 JAMA reported a
multi-state series of infections of Yersinia enterocolitica (bubonic
plague). In a study at UCLA, over 1/3 of all cases of salmonella infection
in California in 1980 to 1983 were traced to raw milk.

Diabetes Epidemic Children who drink cow’s milk have an
11 times higher rate of juvenile diabetes than children who are breastfed
by their own mothers. Although we are not aware of it, milk consumption is
directly associated with Juvenile diabetes. The key to this is that there
are over 100 antigens found in milk. The reason for the increase in
juvenile diabetes is that the children have much higher formation of
antibodies to the cows’ milk antigens. Researchers found up to 8 times the
number antibodies against milk protein in dairy product consuming children
who also developed juvenile diabetes. (Vaarala, O et al. Diabetes,
48:1389-1394, 1999) In Finland, which as the world’s highest milk
consumption, they also have the world’s highest rate of insulin-dependent
diabetes. The problem is that the antibodies to the milk antigens cross
react with the ? cells (the cells that produce insulin) and of the
pancreas create inflammation and scarring. This consequentially blocks or
destroys B cell production of insulin.

Bovine immune deficiency disease. There is also bovine
immune deficiency disease which is another virus. In Russia they found
that it is transferred to humans. The Canadian Journal of Veterinary
Research, and Russian literature, found the detection in human sera of the
antibody to the bovine immunodeficiency virus protein. This virus may be
similar to the human immune deficiency virus.

Cancer

Bovine leukemia virus Bovine leukemia virus is found in
about 80% of the dairy herds in the U.S., or 3 out of 5 dairy cows. It is
mostly destroyed by pasteurization. In raw milk it is not killed. In raw
milk, the bovine leukemia virus is recovered from 2/3 of the samples. The
bovine leukemia virus is associated with an increased rate of leukemia or
lymphomas. To support these statements, we would expect that the states
highest in dairy use—such as Iowa, Nebraska, South Dakota, Minnesota,
Wisconsin, as well as countries like Sweden and Russia—would have a
statistically higher incidence of leukemia than the national average.
Indeed that is the case. Dairy farmers also have a significantly elevated
leukemia rate.

Bovine Leukemic Virus in raw milk Raw is a particular
problem, because the leukemia virus is rendered inactive by the
pasteurization, but remains active in raw milk. All studies show that cows
with leukemia offer a significantly higher rate of leukemia in the animals
and humans who drink this bovine contaminated raw milk.

Lymphoma What we see in Norway where they studied 422
individuals who were followed for 11.5 years; those drinking two or more
glasses of milk per day had 3.5 times the incidence of cancer in the
lymphatic organs compared to the normal population. Ref: British Med.
Journal 61:456-9, March 1990. There seemed to be a high correlation found
by some researchers between increased death from lymphomas and beef and
dairy ingestion in the 15 major countries. The reason for this is that the
dairy intake creates a chronic immunological stress that tends to cause
lymphomas both in laboratory animals and also possibly in humans. We know
that ingestion of cows’ milk can produce generalized lymphopathy, swollen
liver, swollen spleen, and significant adenoid hypertrophy. In England
they also found a strong positive interaction with lymphoma. The British
Journal cites research in which they studied 16,000 individuals for 11.5
years. They reported that drinking two glasses of milk per day, or the
equivalent created a 3.4 times greater incidence of lymphoma. British
Journal of Cancer 61 (3):456-9, March 1990

Ovarian Cancer Drinking more than one glass of milk a
day, or its equivalent, gave women a 3.1 times higher risk of ovarian
cancer than non-milk drinkers. Harvard Medical School did a study and
analyzed data from 27 different countries, and they found the exact same
thing: an increased amount of ovarian cancer is associated with dairy.

Lung Cancer Persons drinking 3 or more glasses of milk a
day had a twofold increase in lung cancer. (International Journal of
Cancer, April 15, 1989)

Prostate Cancer: Men who were drinking 3 or more glasses
a day of whole milk, had a 2.49 times increase in prostate cancer. (Cancer
64 (3): 605-12, 1989)

Physiology for Dairy Digestion

The other argument as to why it is not good for humans
to have dairy, is that it is not our natural cycle. We do have the
physiology as a baby to deal with dairy while we are breastfeeding. Our
bodies then change and we really don’t need mother’s milk past the age of
3 to 5, or when we stop breastfeeding. Many stop producing lactase enzyme
and thus become sensitive to milk. This is known as lactose intolerance.
Lactose intolerance affects 50 million people and is associated with the
gastrointestinal tract. The milk industry itself admits that lactose
intolerance plays intestinal havoc with as many as 50,000,000 Americans.
Up to 90% of blacks and 20%-40% of Caucasians are lactose intolerant, with
variation in between, according to different race genetics.

The result of eating dairy when we no longer need it is
that we tend to develop a multitude of gastrointestinal problems,
allergies, congestion, and sinusitis. Some of the biggest problems are
gastrointestinal and anemia because the reaction of the milk in our GI
tract causes bleeding. Also, if you are drinking a lot of milk (three or
more glasses a day) it is going to increase the rate of osteoporosis,
according to the research, because of the high protein.

Cows milk is not a mother’s milk replacement!

Another aspect of not being aligned with the natural
cycle is that human mother’s milk is designed for the nervous system of
infants, and cow’s milk is more designed to grow a calf. Cow’s milk is 4
times higher in protein than human milk. It is designed for the massive
skeletal and muscle growth which a 400 pound cow needs. Human milk has
6-10 times the essential fatty acids, especially the linoleic acid and DHA,
which is needed for human brain development and overall nervous system
development. One research showed breastfed children had 10 points higher
IQ than children not given mother’s milk.

Summary

Perspectives on Dairy

The message from the research indicates that dairy may
be a less than an appropriate food for this time. It does not mean if you
drink milk that you won’t wake up spiritually. It does clog the nadis
(subtle spiritual nervous system) and brings in the energy of death,
misery and suffering into our spiritual bodies. At this time in history
the choice to be vegan and not using dairy returns us to the original
Garden of Eden Diet* which is part of creating the pre-conditions for a
massive upgrade of human consciousness.

In Humane Cruelty, Suffering and Death

Waste of Resources & Ecological Damage

Transmission serious disease

Associated with Juvenile Diabetes

Lactose Intolerance and Digestive Disorders

A myriad of Toxins & Contaminants

Misaligned with the healthy physiology of human
nutrition or natural diet and life cycle of humans.

It is a choice for the benefit of your health and
spiritual life; for the prevention of cruelty to animals; for the benefit
of holding a way of life that creates the healing of the planet; and for
the benefit of being in the natural cycle, Gabriel and the Tree of Life
does not use milk or its dairy products nor are they recommended to
anyone.

By holding this vegan position, which is a form of
giving joy by being conscious and socially responsible for what we
consume, the Tree of Life gives a spiritual & health message of the
importance of addressing the milk question.

* Garden of Eden Diet Genesis 1:29-30 And God said,
Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face
of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree
yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat.”

For everyone who lives on milk is unskilled in the word
of righteousness, since he is a child. But solid food is for the mature,
for those who have their powers of discernment trained by constant
practice to distinguish good from evil. Hebrews 5:13-14

Gabriel Cousens, M.D., M.D. (H), Diplomate American
Board of Holistic Medicine, Diplomat in Ayurveda is the founder and
director of the Tree of Life Foundation and Tree of Life Rejuvenation
Center in Patagonia, Arizona. Read more about Gabriel

Appendices

Appendix 1: Toxic Residues found in Whole Milk

The following toxins were found in Whole Milk by the US
Food & Drug Administration

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